5 productivity hacks using Dropbox for Business

We all know that Dropbox can make you more productive. And when the whole team is using Dropbox for Business, that’s when efficiency and collaboration really take off.

So how, exactly, does Dropbox make your team more productive? For starters, think of all the time employees currently spend emailing documents, waiting until they get back on their company laptop to finish a project, and checking to make sure they’re using the most up-to-date version of a file. With Dropbox for Business, that all turns into time spent actually getting work done.

But even beyond that, there are hundreds (if not thousands!) of ways to put Dropbox to work for your team. We’ve compiled some of our favorites here; try out one or two (or all five) and feel free to tweak them according to what works best for your team.

1. Make recurring meetings actually productive.

Let’s face it, meetings are often not as useful as they can be — and that’s especially the case with recurring meetings. Make the most of your meeting time by keeping everyone on the same page using shared folders. With a dedicated shared folder for recurring meetings, collaborators can upload the latest documents in advance, ensuring that all team members can prep beforehand. If there’s more than one document per meeting — like prep and follow up — you can create sub-folders for each date.

2. Make onboarding a breeze.

Making sure everyone in the company has access to the same materials is deceptively difficult. Email threads with attachments get long and unwieldy as you forward them to each new hire, and internal wikis often go unused. To make sure everyone — from new hires to veterans — always has access to the same documents (and the right versions), you can set up a shared folder for the whole team. In it, add any files you’d like for everyone to have across the company — this often includes onboarding materials, mission and value decks, FAQs, seating charts, and external-facing collateral. Now whenever you onboard new hires, they’ll have easy access to those files and can hit the ground running.

3. FTP: Forget that process.

Nobody likes FTP. It’s slow, unreliable, and easily breakable. But it serves a common need — letting people upload files without visibility or access into the destination folder. Fortunately, you can say farewell to FTP by using a third-party service like Wufoo, one of the 300,000+ apps that have been built on the Dropbox platform. The Wufoo integration mimics the functionality of FTP by letting users submit files into a customizable form, which then gets saved into your Dropbox for Business folder. (Bonus tip: Check out the Dropbox apps page for more productivity-boosting integrations.)

4. Say goodbye to multiple passwords, and hello to security.

Growing quickly? You may want to consider implementing a single sign-on (SSO) service, which keeps users secure by using a central identity provider for all their logins. With SSO, you don’t have to worry about password reuse, weak passwords, or spreadsheets full of log-in credentials. Dropbox for Business plays nicely with SSO, integrating with the seven leading identity providers. (Bonus tip: Not ready for SSO? You can always turn on two-step verification for your team, to make sure accounts are always protected.)

5. Stay organized with a system you can actually stick with.

If you’re collaborating both internally and externally, it helps to set up your folder structure so it’s easy to quickly go to the right place. The way Dropbox employees typically do that is to start with a “Shared” folder and an “Unshared” folder at the root level. Then in the “Shared” folder, add a folder for “Internal” and a folder for “Clients” (or whatever you’d like to name it). Then make sure each of your folders, whether shared or private, lives in the appropriate parent folder.

These tips just scratch the surface of what’s possible with Dropbox for Business.

Want to see for yourself? Go ahead and take it for a spin with a free trial. And don’t forget to come back to share all the awesome productivity hacks you come up with!

Please note: Sometimes we blog about upcoming products or features before they’re released, but timing and exact functionality of these features may change from what’s shared here. The decision to purchase our services should be made based on features that are currently available.